2W Insight Cloud Cost Accounting Tool: New Features

Accurate distribution of cloud costs among business units, applications, projects etc. according to accepted accounting practices is one of the grea challenges facing enterprise IT Managers and Financial Accountants today. 2W Insight 7.0 simplifies cloud cost accounting by enabling enterprises to create an organizational hierarchy of cost centers aligned to their reporting structure, where resources are assigned, budgets are managed and financial reports are published.

Organizational Hierarchy

2W Insight 7.0 enables enterprises to create a multi-level organizational structure of cost centers tailored to their financial reporting requirements. Users create cost centers for each project, applications, workload etc., then map them to the financial reporting structure. Once the cost centers and structure are established, users assign cloud resources (including reserved instances) to the cost centers where the costs are incurred. 2W Insight applies AWS pricing rules to the usage within each cost center. As you move up the hierarchy of cost centers, 2W Insight combines the usage from the linked (lower level) cost centers and re-applies the AWS pricing rules to the combined usage ensuring pricing is accurate, earned tier discounts are applied and reserved instances savings are optimized.

Example Organizational Reporting Structure:

Assigning Resources to Cost Centers

2W Insight 7.0 enables enterprises to deploy various strategies when assigning resources to cost centers. Enterprises that have implemented a strategy where each workload is placed in a separate AWS account can assign an account to a cost center. When assigned, all usage/cost in the AWS account will be included in the cost center. For enterprises that have implemented a strategy where a single AWS account includes multiple workloads, 2W Insight enables user to filter the resources in one or multiple accounts (by tag, attribute etc.) to locate and assign resources to cost centers. Once assigned, a rule can be added to automatically assign new resources that meet the filter criteria into the cost center. This provides strict governance and control of the resource assignments and provides accurate financial reporting. It also ensures that the elastic nature of the cloud (resources coming and going based on demand) are aligned to the enterprises cloud cost accounting policies.

Budget Management and Alerting

Once the organizational structure is created and resources have been assigned to cost centers, it is important to manage the budget for each cost center. 2W Insight allow users to set budgets for each cost center and receive notifications when budgets are at risk. Users can receive alerts if a single day’s usage exceeds a set daily budget threshold (e.g. if a single days cost is 120% of the daily budget), when the MTD cost exceeds a set monthly budget threshold (e.g. if the month-to-date usage reaches 100% of the monthly budget) or when the month-to-date cost exceeds a set month-to-date budget threshold (MTD cost exceeds MTD budget by 10%). Budget management and alerting ensures you know in advance if your costs are at risk of exceeding budget.

Showback reports

2W Insight comes standard with month-end reports for each of your cost centers. These “Showback” reports detail the costs associated with each of your cost centers by AWS product, and users can be set up to receive the reports at the end of each month. Once users begin receiving these reports, they become more aware and therefore more responsible for their AWS spend.

2W Insight Cloud Cost Accounting tool is provided at no charge to all of our Managed Cloud Services customers. To receive a demonstration of its capabilities and how 2nd Watch helps our clients manage the complexity of the public cloud, please contact us at insight.support@2ndwatch.com.